Many of us inside IBM would like to see at least one free distribution supported. However, IBM won't support Debian unless there's customer demand. You're a customer, so demand it. Keep demanding it.
I dunno what kind of Amiga you were talking about, but the Amiga 2000 I used for a while used to corrupt floppies like crazy.
I never had a 1.4MB Mac or PC floppy go bad, or an Atari ST floppy, however.
We have two Macs and three PCs in the house at the moment, and only one of the machines has a floppy drive. I haven't bought a machine with a floppy since 1997.
You claim that Real is all about choice and opennness. However, your license agreements for your SDK outright prohibit using your software to create programs that will decode Real files and transcode them into other formats. Even unprotected Real audio files may not be converted to AIFF or MP3, according to your license. You have threatened legal action against people for doing so, also.
I know that I, for one, will never purchase files which I am prohibited from transcoding into other formats.
If you're really about openness and freedom of choice, why don't you let me choose what format I keep my audio files in?
Currently I have to play back Real audio of radio shows in real time, record the output to AIFF, then re-encode to MP3, so that I can play on my MP3 player. It'd be so much better if I could just go straight from Real audio to MP3.
That's why I like the ancient Icelandic tradition. Once a year the Law Speaker would have to recite the law. All of it, from start to finish, from memory, without a break. If he missed bits, they were no longer considered part of the law. This kept a really good control over how unwieldy and impossible to understand the law could be.
Hell, imagine if our President had to recite the law once a year. There wouldn't be any space in that cranium for crap like the PATRIOT act.
I'm not sure that exactly the same system is workable for a modern society, but I am sure that I would seriously favor a system where one person had to recite the entire tax law from memory each year to determine how much we all paid. I see no reason why the tax system needs to be even a hundredth as complicated as it is now.
Hell, most people treat the database as an afterthought when designing an application, when, in reality, it should almost always be the *first* consideration.
Actually, the problem domain and user requirements should be the first consideration. You shouldn't even think about the database until you have a domain model...
I've not been double-billed, but I've been billed the wrong amount many times. I have to go through checking every line item each month and comparing with the previous month to be sure they won't sneak in an extra charge or delete a $5 discount I'm eligible for.
To me, Home Economics should have been Economics. How to ballance a checkbook. How to figure out that Credit Card X at 16.99% compounding will take me Y decades to pay off.
And how to work out that the Free iPods thing in your.signature is a pyramid scheme.
You'd probably like my web site then. No tables, no images except occasional photos I've taken, no animations, and the layout's designed to work with any font size and uses relative sizes. Works with Lynx, even.
I did check also, on OS X, Gentoo, and Debian unstable. My systems work fine with Unicode filenames, and changing locale changes the sort order of ls -la as you'd expect, so I contend that they're not misconfigured.
RedHat attempts to activate both ipchains and iptables during boot,
iptables is more recent than ipchains and supports a complete superset of the ipchains functionality. In that sense, ipchains is obsolete, just like ipfwadm. And you pick an interesting example--I'd argue that vim has pretty much obsoleted vi at this point. Most systems ship with vim rather than old Berkeley vi.
Yeah, but I hate doorstop books, and I can't program without decent searchable documentation.
(I have the O'Reilly Java reference HTML CD, for example, because Sun's documentation is often inadequate. Though at least it exists, which is more than you can say for the SWT documentation...)
6. Mac OS X has full Unicode support in the shell, it's one of the reasons why they switched to bash. Just today I rsynced some font files and noticed that the names of the Chinese fonts displayed correctly as pictograms. So, it's a pretty safe bet that my OS X system is correctly set up for internationalization purposes. Yet OS X does not suffer from broken grep, even with the shell set to en_US locale with full Unicode support.
The message you cite from the Debian list explains that collation rules in en_US are different. The other message you cite is also talking about sort order. Neither deals with regular expressions.
POSIX.1 explicitly states that range operators are only defined for the POSIX locale, which is the C locale. Behaviour of character ranges in other locales is unspecified. As such, I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect grep's regular expressions not to suddenly change their meaning in different English-language locales, particularly when you're talking about a construct as common as [A-Z].
The bash NOTES claims that POSIX.2 requires the broken behavior. That may be true, but every system I use takes the sensible route of not making people's scripts break if the user's locale has different collation, except RedHat.
So the best you can say is that RedHat is Broken As Designed, so as to be slavishly compliant with POSIX.2.
I also note that the bash developers have clearly been struggling with the issue of whether to follow POSIX.2 or take the sensible route, as they went from normal behavior to POSIX.2 to normal and then back to POSIX.2 again in the 2.02..2.05 release stream.
Interestingly, Gentoo's grep man page documents that it has the broken POSIX.2 behavior, but it doesn't actually seem to.
9. If you set up your system to run both editors on the same file at startup, that would be analogous. And yes, it would be stupid. As would having two web servers installed by default and having whichever one happens to be first in the init sequence "win", or having three MTAs. If you don't understand why, let me provide you with a few reasons:
a) More code on the system means more code to keep patched, more security holes.
b) You see the iptables script is in the current run level, so you go edit the iptables config. Whoops, except ipchains runs first. That's the sort of thing that can waste hours of a person's time.
c) ipchains is obsolete. If you're doing a clean install (which I was), why the hell install obsolete software which will never be used at best, and at worst might actually cause me to waste my time or even suffer a security problem?
In Perl, if I want to do something, I do it. It takes a line or two of code, and I'm done. In Java, to do something I have to prepare for it AND do it. I often have to create from 1 to 3 objects to finally get the object I need, then I can finally do what I wanted to do.
My favorite example of this is trying to write Java code to produce a datestamp in RFC2822 format. For example, Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:09:23 -0400. Obviously this is something you want to do all the time when programming Internet stuff, and at least up until Java 1.4 it's ludicrously difficult to do. I usually cheat and force all timestamps to UTC to at least cut the code down to size a bit.
Perhaps some Java enthusiasts would care to try and come up with the shortest, simplest implementation of rfc2822DateStamp()?
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Many of us inside IBM would like to see at least one free distribution supported. However, IBM won't support Debian unless there's customer demand. You're a customer, so demand it. Keep demanding it.
Personally, I'd say you're missing a MiniDisc recorder. They're under $100 now.
128MB USB drive for $13 with free shipping.
Now let's see you get 100 floppies for $13.
I dunno what kind of Amiga you were talking about, but the Amiga 2000 I used for a while used to corrupt floppies like crazy.
I never had a 1.4MB Mac or PC floppy go bad, or an Atari ST floppy, however.
We have two Macs and three PCs in the house at the moment, and only one of the machines has a floppy drive. I haven't bought a machine with a floppy since 1997.
Thank goodness for that. Imagine if terrorists hijacked a train and drove it into the Pentagon.
Here's my question:
You claim that Real is all about choice and opennness. However, your license agreements for your SDK outright prohibit using your software to create programs that will decode Real files and transcode them into other formats. Even unprotected Real audio files may not be converted to AIFF or MP3, according to your license. You have threatened legal action against people for doing so, also.
I know that I, for one, will never purchase files which I am prohibited from transcoding into other formats.
If you're really about openness and freedom of choice, why don't you let me choose what format I keep my audio files in?
Currently I have to play back Real audio of radio shows in real time, record the output to AIFF, then re-encode to MP3, so that I can play on my MP3 player. It'd be so much better if I could just go straight from Real audio to MP3.
That's why I like the ancient Icelandic tradition. Once a year the Law Speaker would have to recite the law. All of it, from start to finish, from memory, without a break. If he missed bits, they were no longer considered part of the law. This kept a really good control over how unwieldy and impossible to understand the law could be.
Hell, imagine if our President had to recite the law once a year. There wouldn't be any space in that cranium for crap like the PATRIOT act.
I'm not sure that exactly the same system is workable for a modern society, but I am sure that I would seriously favor a system where one person had to recite the entire tax law from memory each year to determine how much we all paid. I see no reason why the tax system needs to be even a hundredth as complicated as it is now.
The point of the GPL is to enable people to improve and share the software. They can't do that if it relies on data they can't improve and share.
Imagine if Linux was under the GPL, but all the man pages were proprietary and couldn't be changed or copied. How free would it be then?
Actually, the problem domain and user requirements should be the first consideration. You shouldn't even think about the database until you have a domain model...
There's an easier way to bypass the GPL. You release the code, but make it rely on data files which are proprietary, copyrighted, and trademarked.
This is already done by everyone from id Software to the Mozilla project.
1. Screen 15cm or larger, 640x480 or better. Don't care about color.
2. Handwriting recognition. At least as good as Decuma or the Newton MessagePad 2100.
3. USB for connecting to keyboards, digital cameras, etc.
4. Bluetooth for sync with my computer.
5. WiFi and a web browser.
6. A memory expansion slot.
7. Several days of typical usage of battery life; at least an hour or two of WiFi.
8. Outliner w/ checkboxes, calendar, basic word processor, draw program.
9. No Microsoft OS, because I won't buy Microsoft software.
Closest I've found so far is the Sony PEG-TH55, except they removed the Bluetooth in the US so I didn't buy one.
Go back to Fox News, the comment obviously went straight by you.
Ever stop to wonder WHY people are so angry?
There was a lot of violent left-wing activity in Germany in the 1930s too.
They clearly haven't seen my desk.
And SSNs aren't secret, but how many businesses use them for authentication?
I've not been double-billed, but I've been billed the wrong amount many times. I have to go through checking every line item each month and comparing with the previous month to be sure they won't sneak in an extra charge or delete a $5 discount I'm eligible for.
And how to work out that the Free iPods thing in your .signature is a pyramid scheme.
You'd probably like my web site then. No tables, no images except occasional photos I've taken, no animations, and the layout's designed to work with any font size and uses relative sizes. Works with Lynx, even.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas
They're not prepared to pay. That's the problem.
I did check also, on OS X, Gentoo, and Debian unstable. My systems work fine with Unicode filenames, and changing locale changes the sort order of ls -la as you'd expect, so I contend that they're not misconfigured.
RedHat attempts to activate both ipchains and iptables during boot,
iptables is more recent than ipchains and supports a complete superset of the ipchains functionality. In that sense, ipchains is obsolete, just like ipfwadm. And you pick an interesting example--I'd argue that vim has pretty much obsoleted vi at this point. Most systems ship with vim rather than old Berkeley vi.
Yeah, but I hate doorstop books, and I can't program without decent searchable documentation.
(I have the O'Reilly Java reference HTML CD, for example, because Sun's documentation is often inadequate. Though at least it exists, which is more than you can say for the SWT documentation...)
6. Mac OS X has full Unicode support in the shell, it's one of the reasons why they switched to bash. Just today I rsynced some font files and noticed that the names of the Chinese fonts displayed correctly as pictograms. So, it's a pretty safe bet that my OS X system is correctly set up for internationalization purposes. Yet OS X does not suffer from broken grep, even with the shell set to en_US locale with full Unicode support.
The message you cite from the Debian list explains that collation rules in en_US are different. The other message you cite is also talking about sort order. Neither deals with regular expressions.
POSIX.1 explicitly states that range operators are only defined for the POSIX locale, which is the C locale. Behaviour of character ranges in other locales is unspecified. As such, I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect grep's regular expressions not to suddenly change their meaning in different English-language locales, particularly when you're talking about a construct as common as [A-Z].
The bash NOTES claims that POSIX.2 requires the broken behavior. That may be true, but every system I use takes the sensible route of not making people's scripts break if the user's locale has different collation, except RedHat.
So the best you can say is that RedHat is Broken As Designed, so as to be slavishly compliant with POSIX.2.
I also note that the bash developers have clearly been struggling with the issue of whether to follow POSIX.2 or take the sensible route, as they went from normal behavior to POSIX.2 to normal and then back to POSIX.2 again in the 2.02..2.05 release stream.
Interestingly, Gentoo's grep man page documents that it has the broken POSIX.2 behavior, but it doesn't actually seem to.
9. If you set up your system to run both editors on the same file at startup, that would be analogous. And yes, it would be stupid. As would having two web servers installed by default and having whichever one happens to be first in the init sequence "win", or having three MTAs. If you don't understand why, let me provide you with a few reasons:
a) More code on the system means more code to keep patched, more security holes.
b) You see the iptables script is in the current run level, so you go edit the iptables config. Whoops, except ipchains runs first. That's the sort of thing that can waste hours of a person's time.
c) ipchains is obsolete. If you're doing a clean install (which I was), why the hell install obsolete software which will never be used at best, and at worst might actually cause me to waste my time or even suffer a security problem?
...and you people advocating SWT need to write some decent searchable online documentation for it.
My favorite example of this is trying to write Java code to produce a datestamp in RFC2822 format. For example, Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:09:23 -0400. Obviously this is something you want to do all the time when programming Internet stuff, and at least up until Java 1.4 it's ludicrously difficult to do. I usually cheat and force all timestamps to UTC to at least cut the code down to size a bit.
Perhaps some Java enthusiasts would care to try and come up with the shortest, simplest implementation of rfc2822DateStamp()?